Imagination’s Toybox Returns
The earliest manuscript I can find for Imagination’s Toybox bears a copyright date of 1992. I wrote the system for a modern-day pulp setting, the disaster-plagued Knights of Torque & Recoil, but had decided to spin it off into its own generic system. I’m not going to bore you with the long, tedious history of the game and why it’s taken me two decades to get it published. What matters is that it will be published, and it will be published later this year.
Tabletop roleplayers steal, borrow, adapt and mashup material from other sources to create their settings and campaigns. At least, that’s been my experience in over 30 years in the hobby. It’s certainly what I do. If I’m running Game A, I might take bits from Game B, a character from a novel I’m reading, a plot from a movie, a magic item from a comic book, the look of a particular actor, and personality traits from a guy I work with, throw them into a blender, change the names and a couple of dead-giveaway details, and call it my own. It’s just part of the creative process, and in working with published fiction authors, comics creators, and people in the film, television, and video game industries, it’s a pretty universal part of the creative process. We all have our influences, our likes and dislikes, and frankly it’s easier to build on the foundation that’s come before. When you’re putting together a game for your friends, using elements you’re already familiar with, or taking existing bits and using them in slightly different ways, makes it easier to prepare. For the players, it’s easier to get into the game when there are elements that are familiar to them that they can interact with, build upon, and add their own twists to. It’s not like most of us are going to try to commit outright intellectual property theft and publish our chimeras for profit. Those who do are creative enough to bandy about words like homage and pastiche and to make the mixture feel fresh enough that it at least feels like something new.
Roleplaying, you see, has no unique genres. The earliest games were based and high fantasy, sword and sorcery, and horror fiction. Game settings, and game rules, are all adaptations and interpretations of things we’re seen in other media. Certainly, decades after the dawn of the hobby, there are players who came to tabletop roleplaying first and learned about the influences behind it later. But the origins of the hobby remain elsewhere.
When I first sat down to write Imagination’s Toybox, I didn’t want to write just another generic rules set. I wanted something that could act as a “universal translator”, letting me quickly and easily pull in disparate elements from a variety of places and graft them together easily. I didn’t want to have to create separate books, or even separate chapters, to describe different genres, tones, or media. “Superheroes work like this” and “movies work like that” and so on. What I found was that rather than creating statistics-and-dice systems, I was building a vocabulary and philosophy of telling stories and creating settings. Creators in those other media, after all, don’t assign numbers and roll dice to determine if the hero hits the villain; they have the characters do what best suits the needs of the story. This isn’t to say that character ability scores and mechanics aren’t important; it’s more that they work best with the context of some other types of rules.
Illegitimi non carborundum,
Berin
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